The Story Of How We Came To Have The Home Friend Publication

In the late 1980’s we were living in an old farm house here in Port Orchard, Washington. During a remodeling project where we were intending to take out a wall between two rooms, one side of the wall was removed, and much to our surprise in between the studs was an old “”magazine” called The Home Friend from 1909. Many times people would leave a time capsule of sorts by putting things in walls when a house was finished.

The pages were in fairly good shape, but there was some wear that most likely came from going through the mail in that era. It was addressed to a home in the Waterman area, which I believe that the same home we were living in at that time. The house had been moved, but the publication had remained in the wall. The Home Friend was published in Kansas City, Missouri and touted itself as the “largest publication in the Southwest”.

A few years ago I took the publication to have it copied and put on a disk for posterity. It’s taken me a while to get it so it can be available to the public, but it is now available for download in PDF format here on my blog page. It is thirty-two pages in size and even though the original was on over-sized paper it has been saved very well in the PDF format so that you can see every word and image. I think you will be pleasantly surprised by the contents, although since it is a one-of-a-kind download it must be shared “as is” with with some stories that are serials that leave the reader wondering what happened. There is even an old advertisement for an Edison product.